The Conduit

It's a first-person shooter that revolves around government conspiracies and alien cover-ups. It's using an advanced 3D engine that really makes the most of Nintendo's hardware. And it features a control scheme that fully utilizes the Wii remote.

It's called The Conduit and it takes place during present day. Washington D.C. finds itself the epicenter of an extraterrestrial attack and it's up to gamers, as the secret service's Agent Ford, to discover the truth hidden behind the invasion. To do that, he'll need a variety of guns and the skills to use them. High Voltage calls The Conduit a straightforward first-person shooter in the style of Halo, Medal of Honor Heroes 2 or Resistance: Fall of Man – basically, fast, run-and-gun battles and stylized weapons. The Conduit also features advanced enemy artificial intelligence enabling "human-like behavior" and a special device called the All Seeing Eye (or ASE), which, according to the studio, allows players to "reveal concealed objects and enemies, providing a deeper level of puzzle-solving."

The game-maker's "Quantum3" game engine brings polish to The Conduit by way of a "full 16-TEV stage material pipeline using up to eight texture sources and a host of innovative blend operations." In short, it allows the developer to create graphic effects normally seen on other consoles with vertex and pixel shaders – specifically, dynamic bump-mapping (via tangent space normals or embossing), reflection and refraction (via real-time cube or spherical environmental maps), light / shadow maps, projected texture lights, specular and Fresnel effects, emissive and iridescent materials, advanced alpha blends, light beams / shafts, gloss and detail mapping, seamless resource streaming, projected shadows, heat distortion and motion blur, interactive water with dual-wave channels and complex surface effects, animated textures, and more. Readers may not know what all this technical jargon means – that's not the problem. The problem is that too many Wii developers don't know what it means, either.

"We think it's a real shame that publishers and developers aren't taking advantage of the technical possibilities of the Wii platform. Most Wii games don't even look as good as the later day PS2 titles and that's a real slap in the face to consumers," seconds Kerry Ganofsky, CEO and founder, High Voltage Software. "We believe that third-party developers need to step up to the plate and deliver. The Wii platform is capable of a lot more than what consumers have seen so far. We're hoping to raise a new bar." Nofsinger takes it a step farther. "Most of the games on the Wii look like crap. We want to change that, so we've invested heavily in our Wii tech over the past year. We have real-time normal mapping, reflection and refraction, post process full screen effects, real-time shadows, projected lights and textures, specularity and fresnel effects, emissive and iridescent materials, interactive water, morphing, and much more all running with a rock solid frame rate on the Wii. Our goal is to be the most technically innovative Wii developer on the planet."

All The Conduit screens you seen included in this article (and in our media section) are running in real-time on the Wii hardware. Currently, the game runs at a steady 30 frames per second, but High Voltage is aiming for the Holy Grail: 60 frames. Up until now, High Voltage has self-funded the project, but soon enough it will take on a publisher and endeavor to prove the point that the majority of third-parties are being lazy about Wii development, an assertion that we agree with. Of course, we can't completely fault the development community as big games require big funding, something that some publishers don't want to hand out when Wii games are concerned.
"There is this pervasive and cyclical argument that Wii consumers don't want mature titles, when there aren't those types of products available to them. And even more frustrating is the claim that Wii consumers only care about great gameplay. Of course they care about gameplay, but we believe if given the choice, they would want great graphics as well. It's just a cop out," says Nofsinger. "With Conduit, we are trying to make a Wii game that looks like a 360 title."